I’ve been ill for a few days and so haven’t got as far as I’d like with this video, but I’m hoping to make up some lost time this week.

Here is the version (over a minute) that I submitted to the aniboom.com contest site in order to be considered for the next round. Sorry about the terrible audio quality – YouTube’s compression pretty much destroys it. I will get a higher res link up soon.

Having fun with this video and looking forward to finishing it – I want to see the whole thing!

I should have a new journal update here very soon as well.

Weird Fishes WIP

EDIT:  This video has been replaced with a newer version – please see above.

Since the deadline for uploading an animatic/storyboard for the contest was April 28th, I decided to eschew the traditional storyboarding process and go straight into animating as much of the video as I could before the deadline. I had an idea of how I wanted the video to look, so I spent a day or two researching images and experimenting with different “looks” in After Effects for my animations.

The video is set underwater, and the main “character” is a small submarine, descending ever deeper as the song progresses. I wanted the video to look fairly simple, with a stylized, almost cartoon-ish look. To achieve this I played around with a few different ideas and came up with a very simple technique that gave me something close to the “look” I wanted. I’ll try to summarise the process quickly here…

First of all, I decided that I wanted two main POVs for the action in the video. One is a first-person view, looking out through the porthole in the submarine. I used a stylized porthole graphic to frame the action for these scenes.

Here’s the first-person view:



The second POV is a third-person perpective looking at the sub from the side (the right side, to be precise). One of the reasons I chose this view is that it reminded me a bit of old-school side-scrolling video games I used to play in the early 80′s where you’d control a spaceship or something travelling from left to right across the screen through various obstacles and swarms of enemies. I think it was also a reasonable choice given my limited animation abilities…

And here’s the side-view:



Most of the actual content for the video (so far) has come from either manipulated images, or from drawings I did myself in Flash and Zbrush. I used Flash to create traced bitmaps from real images (see below for process) and I used ZBrush to create some of the terrain stuff you see on the seabed in certain scenes.

For example, to create a scene where a large shoal (swarm, herd, flock?) of shrimp are swimming past outside the porthole, I took an image of a shrimp, imported it into Flash, used the Trace Bitmap function on it and changed some colours, then cleaned it up to isolate it with a nice alpha channel. Then I imported the resulting .png file into After Effects and created an animated loop out of it using the puppet tool. I then used the short animated movie as a custom particle so that the particle system in After Effects could spit out dozens of animated shrimp with their size, loop start-point and other parameters randomized and offset to give a more realistic effect.

The original shrimp image:

The processed shrimp image:

The short “Puppet Tool” animation loop:




The final shot with animated shrimp as particles:




I repeated this technique (with particles) for various swimming sea creatures in the video.

For some of the other elements, i.e. plants and seahorses, I didn’t use the particle system because I wanted more control over where they should go. In those cases I positioned individual looped animations in 3D space so that the camera could move through them, giving the illusion of depth.



Plants and other elements:

The submarine was drawn in Flash (design based on the “Alvin” submersible) and some odd gradient shading applied, depending on the lighting in the scene. Here are a couple of examples:

Next update: Competition information, animation challenges and more.

I am currently a full-time student at NSCC Truro in Nova Scotia, Canada. I am studying Interactive & Motion Graphics (IMOG), and will be entering my second year in September 2008. In my second year I will be specializing in visual effects and taking an elective in 3D modelling.

For my first-year capstone project, I chose to create a music video for one of Radiohead’s songs “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”. The animation website Aniboom is currently running an animation contest where anyone can choose any song they like from Radiohead’s new album “In Rainbows” and create a video for it.

Since I’m a Radiohead fan anyway, when I saw this contest I thought it would be the ideal capstone project, allowing me to pull together some of the things I’ve learned in the past year about visual design, film, animation, visual effects and so on.

Now that I’m 4 or 5 weeks into the project, I’m realising just how much work is involved in animating a 5 minute 20 second music video by yourself. I have definitely wondered if I’ve bitten off more than I can chew over the past few weeks…

Things seemed to go quickly and smoothly when I started the project, but about two weeks ago I met my first stumbling block. It was actually more of a technical stumbling block than anything else. I needed to animate a glowing point of light smoothly around the screen – should be easy, it certainly sounds simple… But I tried all sorts of things that just didn’t look right or animate right. Finally, yesterday actually, I hit upon a solution that seems to work well and now I’m back on track. I’m also just getting over a bout with the flu. Being ill probably doesn’t help much when you’re trying to think clearly and problem-solve, either, otherwise I’d have had this problem cracked a while ago.

It’s certainly interesting thinking about the little things that hold you up and cause roadblocks in your workflow. Very frustrating, too!

Anyway – progress is being made again!

The purpose of this blog for the time being is to keep a weekly journal where I can document my progress on creating this music video for my IMOG (Interactive and Motion Graphics) capstone project.

Since I’ve been keeping notes for the past 4 weeks or so in various different places, I will need to transcribe those notes and thoughts to this blog. I had made considerable progress this morning, but then a strange error happened at my web-hosting company and I lost it all without warning…  Anyway, back to work!

Stay tuned!